February 6

 Sunny today. If the forecast temperatures will be as predicted over this week we won't have any snow by Friday.

Who would have thought a damn balloon floating at 60k feet would have caused such a spate of stupidity among elected Republicans. Have you seen the photos of some of them holding various guns pointed in the sky? Somebody should tell those boys (and they were boys) that projectiles from this guns won't reach that high. The Republicans are grasping at any slender semblance of a thought to criticize Biden. He should have told everyone when we first sighted the balloon. Why? What could the great American population have done about it? He should have shot it down immediately. Really? Over international waters in the Pacific?? We don't have any right to do that over international waters. Over Alaska, Canada, Idaho, or Montana or any of the other states it flew over? And what if it fell on someones house?? Do they think the Canadians would have enjoyed having debris as large as a couple of busses falling on them? Biden gave the order and the military brass suggested they wait until they were over the Atlantic in shallow waters where they could close the area to civilian traffic, not threaten any structures or people, and have a chance of retrieving debris that might give valuable information. And that is what they did. I don't see anything to criticize. 

The news this morning started off with the massive earthquakes in Southern Turkiye and Northern Syria (7.8 and 7.5 with large aftershocks). We have the BBC news on now covering the story as it is developing. But as I am listening to that I am also reading a post on Tomdispatch.com written by Barbara Gordon describing her experience after she moved from rainy Portland to San Francisco where her first winter was dominated by an atmospheric river pattern before that term became familiar to all of us. (Englehardt's intro is also interesting). But that reference to atmospheric rivers reminded me of the recent repeated such rivers deluging and flooding most of the west coast and that led me to look up the Drought Monitor to see what that had done to the continuing drought there. Guess what? It didn't do much to alleviate the situation. And we have experienced a multi year La Niña which is expected to flip to an El Niño later this year. We can expect dryer and hotter conditions which will probably continue the pattern of more record hot years. Gordon added a bit to my Spanish vocabulary with the phrase her Mexican-American friend used: el pinche Niño. By the way, Turkiye is the preferred spelling per the government though my spell checker doesn't like it much.